Understanding the governance of sustainability pathways: Hydraulic megaprojects, social-ecological traps, and politicized networks of action situations

To enable robust and just sustainability pathways, we need to understand how social-ecological systems (SES) respond to different governance configurations, considering their historical, institutional, political and power conditions. We advance a robust methodological tool for the integrated analysis of those conditions, focusing on SES traps and building on an existing case study: the Doñana region (Guadalquivir estuary, SW Spain), an estuary-delta SES. Doñana is characterized by institutional rigidity for water resources and wetland conservation governance and, more generally, by a SES rigidity trap. Here, we focus on a relatively recent hydraulic megaproject involving deep dredging in the Guadalquivir estuary, finally canceled due to its broad negative socioeconomic and environmental repercussions. Our methodological development consists of a novel combination of the politicized version of the Institutional Analysis and Development (pIAD) framework and the Networks of Action Situations (NAS) approach. Our analysis reveals a governance configuration characterized by strategic interactions among key actors posing no new large socioeconomic or environmental risks in the short term. This pattern is however vulnerable due to an underlying coordination failure and sub-optimal equilibrium situation, which emerge from a pattern of uncooperative behavior that cannot be explained without considering discourse inertia and power dynamics. Deep dredging could have led to a sudden fall of governance into a below sub-optimal equilibrium and regime shift toward a lock-in trap posing high sunk and trajectory-shifting costs. Currently, the game is on for achieving a shift to a high ‘blue equilibrium’ and launching a robust sustainability pathway through collective action.

Application of Sentinel-2A/B satellites to retrieve turbidity in the Guadalquivir estuary (Southern Spain)

<p>Application of Sentinel-2A/B satellites to retrieve turbidity in the Guadalquivir estuary (Southern Spain)</p><p>Due to climate change, contamination, and diverse anthropogenic effects, water quality monitoring is intensifying its importance nowadays. Remote sensing techniques are becoming an important tool, in parallel with fieldwork, for supporting the cost-effective accomplishment of water quality mapping and management. In the recent years, Sentinel-2A/B twin satellites of the European Commission Earth Observation Copernicus programme emerged as a promising way to monitor complex coastal waters with higher spatial, spectral and temporal resolution. However, atmospheric and sunglint correction for the Sentinel-2 data over the coastal and inland waters is one of the major challenges in terms of accurate water quality retrieval. This study aimed at evaluating the ACOLITE atmospheric correction processor in order to develop a regional turbidity model for the Guadalquivir estuary (southern Spain) and its adjacent coastal region using Sentinel-2 imagery at a 10 m spatial resolution. Two settings for the atmospheric correction algorithm within the ACOLITE software were applied: the standard dark spectrum fitting (DSF) and the DSF with an additional option for sunglint correction. Turbidity field data were collected for calibration/validation purposes from the monthly Guadalquivir Estuary-LTER programme by Andalusian Institute of Agricultural and Fisheries Research and Training (IFAPA) using a YSI-EXO2 multiparametric sonde for the period 2017-2020 at 2 fixed stations (Bonanza and Tarfia) sampling 4 different water masses along the estuary salinity gradient. Several regional models were evaluated using the red band (665 nm) and the red-edge bands (i.e. 704, 740, 783 nm) of the Sentinel-2 satellites. The results revealed that DSF with glint correction performs better than without glint correction, especially for this region where sunglint is a major concern during summer, affecting most of the satellite scenes. This study demonstrates the invaluable potential of the Sentinel-2A/B mission to monitor complex coastal waters even though they were not designed for aquatic remote sensing applications. This improved knowledge will be a helpful guideline and tool for the coastal managers, policy-makers, stakeholders and the scientific community for ensuring sustainable ecosystem-based coastal resource management under a global climate change scenario.</p>

New record of the non-indigenous copepod Pseudodiaptomus marinus Sato, 1913 (Calanoida, Pseudodiaptomidae) from the Guadalquivir Estuary (Gulf of Cádiz, SW Spain)

This paper reports the first ocurrence of the Indo-Pacific copepod Pseudodiaptomus marinus in the Guadalquivir Estuary (Gulf of Cádiz, SW Spain), and provides some data on its morphology. The record is based on hundreds of specimens (which include males, females, and ovigerous females) captured in October 2016 at the mouth of the river, a marine protected area under the Fishing Reserve regulation. This reports confirms the presence of a stable population of P. marinus in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, a locality intermediate between the previously recorded distribution areas of northern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, and thus allows an expansion of the hitherto known geographical distribution and supports, once again, the role that maritime transport plays as a vector in the colonization of new habitats by exotic species.